


Lady of the Shadow and Thorn

by thegoodthebadandthenerdy



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Druid!Julia, Gen, Julia Burnsides Lives, POV Second Person, Reaper!Julia, Tumblr Prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-02
Updated: 2019-06-02
Packaged: 2020-04-06 17:44:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,843
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19067515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegoodthebadandthenerdy/pseuds/thegoodthebadandthenerdy
Summary: grasslandgirl asked: julia's a reaper au-You know what you're doing is wrong.





	Lady of the Shadow and Thorn

**Author's Note:**

> so i've never written in 2nd person but this popped into my head and i wrote it literally in an hour so i hope it works!

You know what you're doing is wrong. You know it in whatever part of your heart still beats, and you know it in every crackling bolt of your fingertips.

The difference, of course, comes down to knowing and caring. You know a lot of things, but you don't quite care. 

You used to know how to care. It's not hard, caring, but to your mind it is now far too much work. Like stripping wallpaper from the walls- tedious and only worth it for appearances.

So: you know what you're doing is wrong, but you don't care.

The book in front of you cares, though. Truly, in the part of its heart that beats and in the crackling of its pages, it cares. Not about you, but about something. Maybe power.

That's fine, because you don't care about it. Not in appearance or in heart.

But once you brush past the burning heart and the unsteady caring and the crackling embers, you get to the meat and potatoes. Meat and bones, more aptly.

Not quite meat yet, your spellwork has been a bit bone-heavy. Stupid book and its stupid asides that leave you with extra bones before you and no meat on the nose. There can't be a bone nose!

Maybe you lean too hard into the chanting, maybe it's too loud from the little basement of the pop and pop pizza parlor above you, maybe the thunder in the room doesn't perfectly coincide with the thunderstorm above that you'd planned around.

Or maybe you aren't as good as you thought.

Because while you chant - trying for a nose, a nose specifically - you can feel pinpricks on the back of your neck. It's subtle at first, like stabbing yourself with a dull needle while pinning fabric on a dressform. Which is to say you don't draw blood, but it hurts like you did.

You've learned to brush off bad feelings because you're in the business of creating bad feelings now. You're actually quite good at it- though admittedly it's just another skill you can't flaunt.

A nose shouldn't be so hard to conjure. You've got a perfectly good one on your face that you would give if it wasn't an anchor of pleasant symmetry, but really, you shouldn't even have to consider it. One nose - long and broad, flat and pronounced, small and impish, doesn't matter - should not be so hard to conjure, and you should not have such a pit in your stomach!

You wonder, briefly, if it was the mushrooms on the pizza you ate earlier. You thought they looked odd, but they'd tasted like butter and exhaled like spice, and who were you, really, to judge a mushroom by its cap? 

You begin to wonder, not so briefly, if any can judge a face by its bone-nose. There's a sweat broken out on your brow like an infectious disease and there are extra bones shaking on the floor by your feet - finger joints, lovely - and you feel awful. Oh, so awful.

But you keep chanting against the book's protestations and you start to see skin forming along the bridge and you are so close, because you are good at your job, and there are payments to be collected for landlord's pay. Maybe that's why you feel awful- it's almost the first of the month.

The brick around you quivers, and you realize, barely, dimly, that it's surely not from the broad-shouldered pizza oven above you chugging out sauced and anchovied specials. The dust shakes from the mortar and the air seems to bend until it snags somewhere past your lungs, but you. keep. chanting. 

It's quite a feat. You'd thought you'd be done by now.

Your fingers are tired and bloodied where they scamper across the page - hours and paper cuts - but they do the trick and keep you and the blue light arching through the air on track.

Everything else around you, however, goes to absolute hell.

The air seems to pop back into the room all at once, bringing dust to your lungs and two figures before you. One for each of your eyes.

You can't spare much of yourself, not this close to the end of the spell, but what you see is enough. An elven figure bridled in flame and a human woman who doesn't seem human at all.

Their faces flash to skulls, and you wonder, horribly, what exactly was in those mushrooms.

You are so close, though. How can you give up?

As it turns out, you don't give up at all.

Your work is engulfed in flame in the second it takes you to get from _os_ to _cartilago_. A shame and a pity, but not irreconcilable.

You drop the book to let it do its caring somewhere else - don't even bother to register when it skitters across the stone flooring to somewhere behind you - and clap your hands together for your own flame. Yours is a calming chartreuse, though no one has ever called chartreuse calming. It fights a hazy orange, and someone, somewhere, has surely called orange hazy.

Fighting fire with fire is an adage, so you assume it must have worked at least once. You would do better to remember the one about assuming, than that of fire. But you are made of incantation and sulfur today, so you can be forgiven for that transgression only.

You slam back to the present to a searing pain. You think, of course, it's fire. Fight fire with fire and you will get burned. Isn't that how it goes? Did you make that up?

You're startled to feel it bite into your skin. A lot like you bit into those mushrooms. You really, really regret the mushrooms.

Your eyes waver only once, to your own body, and your heart momentarily beats in caring. For yourself, which isn't a feat, but you must make do with what you give yourself.

Thorns, red dipped and tipped, slide into your skin, chaining themselves to you. Oddly, it hurts less than the goosbumps had. Still, you can't brush this bad feeling away.

You snap your eyes to the elf- she's wreathed now. Unbridled and wearing her laurel crown. It would be impressive if it wasn't so damn embittering. Not embittering- that's not even a word. 

(You don't give up, but perhaps you lose it.)

You snap your eyes to her and she's. Laughing. The vines that the thorns are sewn to slither higher up you and you hear the faintest, rustic laugh as a thorn brushes against your-

_Got your nose!_

You squeal with the opposite of delight as the not-quite-human human drags her fist down through the air and you feel your body slump toward the smooth stonework beneath you. Her eyes flash sap-colored poison, and you feel fear strike the lowest chord you have. 

You don't give up, but you don't protest against her. You may be incantation and sulfur, but she's all teeth, and you know when not to try to pry open a bite with just your fingers.

Her hair whips around her, brown and hidden beneath a plain handkerchief to keep it from those sonorous eyes, but her concentration never breaks. You could have learned a thing or two from her.

But there's a terrible ripping sound, so many busted seams, and a tear slinks up the vines until they split in two, dropping you to-

You thought the floor, but you accept the nether. It's easier, in a way.

(The last thing you see is the non-elven woman with her hands sweetly patting the vines so as to stitch them back together under her cooing supervision. She seems, almost, like someone you would've bought daffodils from for your mother. But her eyes catch you as you sink through the tear - made by the third figure above you now, you presume - and you know that anything she sold you could not afford to be scrutinized by.)

You're greeted by a plain-clothed man, all human until he's not, who nods at you as if acknowledgment will brighten your day. 

It does, but you won't say anything about that. And you doubt they have a customer service survey.

He takes in your punctured state behind plain glasses, and makes sure to pair that with pursed, Carmex slick lips. His finger makes a check mark in the air, though you don't even pretend to expect relief.

 _I have a few questions,_ he tells you, and suddenly, he's holding your bleeding-heart book. He laugh-smiles, shakes his head to himself, holds the thick spine with just thumb and forefinger.

You don't dignify him with a response at first, but he shrugs and pulls a smooth stone from his pocket and relays your reluctance to names you don't know but think you can pinpoint on gut feeling alone and suddenly you are made not of anything else but answers.

You know what you did was wrong, but the only thing you care about now is not having to see those unearthly eyes or feel the sweet slither of chlorophyll-dyed fingers upon your skin again.

You spend more time than you should relaying her to anyone you meet. In life you were a sorcerer, though corrupted, but in death you were a bard, though without any instrument save for your voice. 

Information comes to you in slivers, but you have always made do. 

The story comes to all in whispered snippets.

_For years there sat a cottage in the afterworld. It was made of plain board and decorated in the most elaborate of vines. In that cottage lived a woman - she was also made of the plainest materials, but her veins were weavings of grass, her eyes were struck with sunlight - and her brood of dogs. On the day of the soul's revolt, she fought against them instead of with, knowing the consequence for such things, and knowing there was, in fact, a fate worse than death. The Raven Queen does not take a deed as such lightly, and so she visited that cottage on an unassuming Tuesday, making herself at home amongst the plant-life, their colors reminding her of her wife and perhaps making her lenient. That visit passed only with one question, and only with one answer. By the next morning, the cottage sat empty, not hide nor hair of the woman or her spectral band to be seen. Not until the stories began to trickle in. The vines, the thorns, the sickly-sweet scent of unseen blossoms, and sometimes the baying of ghostly hounds. The reapers are feared, but it is perhaps the woman with the handkerchief and the kind until they aren't eyes, the listening ear unless all you have to say are dark words, the sweet laugh and the smart quip, who is feared the most by those who have done things that should make them fear. Because she is fair, but she is final, and you are just one of the many to find that out._

_Perhaps you shouldn't have run for so long._

**Author's Note:**

> im on tumblr @foxmulldr !!


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